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Home to hit iOS 'hopefully before summer,' Android port still a possibility

Benjamin Rivers' Home, first released on PC last year, will be legitimately terrifying iOS and Mac users "hopefully before summer," the one-man studio told us during GDC. "If I could do this before the summer, that would be ideal, but that all depends on getting certified and making sure that all the bugs are worked out," Rivers said.

While Home's mobile port has never had an official release date, the original plan was for the game to come out much earlier this year. "The scope of getting this thing re-ported was a huge thing," Rivers said. "I use Game Maker, and they have a new suite of tools which lets you do iOS, Android, all that stuff. The unfortunate thing was that they came out with all that stuff after the game was released, so I've basically been spending the last six to seven months re-coding the whole game to match the new suite and to get everything up and running."

Rivers' work re-coding the game for iOS may have been time consuming, but it also may allow him to release an Android version of Home some time in the future. "Theoretically, it's easy to do Android because it's all running off the same code base," Rivers told us. "What I want to do is target the most popular phones and make sure that it's good. If things go weird and wonky, it's so easy to ruin that immersion, so I don't want it to be like 'Oh yeah, it'll totally work on your three year old HTC 2.1 device,' it can't do that."

As a result, Rivers anticipates that an Android version of Home would likely be optimized to run on a small selection of the most popular/common Android handsets, such as Samsung's Galaxy S line of devices.